Stag

by Karen Russell

“Look at that silly tortoise,” he said. “Nature certainly has a wicked sense of humor.” “I have to strongly disagree, sir. I think that Nature is deeply humorless. Deeply and soaringly unconscious. If our species has a role to play here, it’s to supply the laugh track.”

“Matthew and Nia made a promise they could not keep. Promises are fragile things. You blink, and they turn into lies.”

There is a loneliness that cannot know itself, that needs us to walk alongside it. I should tell my hosts that I was wrong: it’s not only the laugh track we humans supply to the desert. The God I still pray to is something like this: a night that wants us to inhabit it.